Brutality, dust and ash

The city that hosted the 1942 Battle of Stalingrad now goes by its pre-Communist name of Volgograd, but the Russian people are so proud of their resistance against the Nazis that they recently voted to revive the old name for six days each year to commemorate the fight. And what a fight. The turning point in Hitler’s war on the eastern front, it resulted in 850,000 casualties for the German army and even more for the ultimately victorious Soviets.

Clearly, the five-month battle isn’t going to be given its full due in two hours on the screen. Instead, Russian director Fedor Bondarchuk has chosen to concentrate on a handful of soldiers – a mix of armed forces, ranks and personality types – with a feisty 18-year-old standing in for the city’s besieged civilian population.

The movie gets off to an odd start – so odd that you may wonder if you’re in the right theatre. The setting is the rescue operation following the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of 2011. A Russian aid worker is speaking to a German woman trapped in the rubble and, to calm her down, begins to tell her a story.

It’s a weird way into Stalingrad, and although it will ultimately make sense as a framing device, it’s not strictly necessary. But at least it’s a relatively peaceful scene; the next two hours will be full of sudden brutality and death, the dim light of the ashen city of Stalingrad further darkened by your 3D glasses.

It’s become something of a warmovie cliché to try to out-gun the Omaha Beach battle scene from Saving Private Ryan, and Bondarchuk throws his heart into it with a sequence that has the Germans blowing up the Russians’ fuel supplies. The subsequent battle features Soviet soldiers lit up like human Molotov cocktails.

It’s a wonder anyone survives, but in the relative calm of the aftermath a small group of soldiers takes refuge in a dilapidated house with a view of a small square and some German atrocities.

Led by Kapitan Gormov (Pyotr Fyodorov), the group includes crack sniper Chvanov, musician-turnedsoldier Nikiforov, widower Polyakov and young Sergey the radio operator. That said, the characters are so thinly developed (and covered in dust) that for much of the movie I neither knew nor cared which was which.

Easier to keep track of is Katya (Mariya Smolnikova), one of the building’s prewar occupants. She’s so dirty and dishevelled when they first meet her that her age, sex and even status among the living are in dispute. She eventually cleans up nicely, though not so nicely that you’d mistake this for a Hollywood take on the war.

There’s not much to endear us to the Russians. They’re protective of Katya to a man, but otherwise they squabble, bicker, and in one instance even shoot one of their own. But the invaders are far worse, at one point rounding up civilians and burning alive a mother and daughter whom they suspect of being Jewish.

The local German commander, Kapitan Kan, is slightly less brutal than his men, but only because he seems exhausted by the war, which still has almost another three years to go. He sneaks off to a German prostitute every chance he gets, to the disgust of his superiors.

Kan is played by Thomas Kretschmann, who started his film career 20 years ago in a movie called Stalingrad, told from a German perspective. This isn’t as unlikely as it sounds. There have been numerous fictional re-creations of the battle over the years, from a Soviet two-parter in 1949 to Enemy at the Gates (2001).

This one is unlikely to top the lists of history aficionados. Give it top marks for violence and threedimensional dust and ash, which seem to float in front of viewers for the full 131 minutes of the film. But there isn’t enough humanity under the grime and bullets to fully sustain our interest.

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